TO COVER THE COUNTRY WITH GOOD SCHOOLS: A CENTURY'S EFFORT.

The article discusses the efforts of the British government to provide good school education in Great Britain. The 1870 Act covered the country with elementary school buildings in an astonishingly short time. By 1876 their number had been doubled, by 1880 there were sufficient to enable the Government to make attendance everywhere compulsory. By comparison with the advance of elementary education between 1870 and 1900, that of secondary education was halting, and largely haphazard. While the English educational system was thus being administratively improved, new ideas were seeping into it from overseas, ideas which completely undermined conventional concepts of schooling; which declared that education was not instruction but experience, not preparation for livelihood but actual living. Today, a quarter of a century later, there is a tendency in some sophisticated quarters to look down the nose at the Education Act, 1944 to regard it as a rather feeble middle-class compromise which has not altered anything very much. The country inherited in 1870 a good infant school tradition, which it has immensely enhanced.